Opportunity To Churn: Teacher Assignments Within New York City Schools
Virtually all discussions of teacher turnover focuses on teachers leaving schools and/or the profession. However, a recent working paper by Allison Atteberry, Susanna Loeb and James Wyckoff, which was presented at this month’s CALDER conference, reaches a very interesting conclusion using data from New York City: There is actually more movement within NYC schools than between them.*
Specifically, the authors show that, during the years for which they had data (1997-2002 and 2004-2010), over 50 percent of teachers in any given year exhibited some form of movement (including leaving the profession or switching schools), but two-thirds of these moves were within schools – i.e., teachers changing grades or subjects. Moreover, they find that these within-school moves, like those between-schools/professions, appear to have a negative impact on testing outcomes, one which is very modest but statistically discernible in both math and reading.
There are a couple of interesting points related to these main findings.
The first is the sheer extent of within-school churn. It may be the case that NYC is somewhat of an outlier here, but the fact that one-third of teachers in the city stay in the same school but change grades/subjects in any given year is rather surprising (at least to me). And this analysis suggests that it may also have consequences for teacher and student performance.
(Side note: Needless to say, these within-school moves, both in terms of why they happen and what they mean, vary